Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (May 17/02) - Take a dab of snow and layer it onto a human finger. Add a whirring motorized filing machine. Bathe the ingredients with ultra-violet light, and wait.

Raine Eskelson grinds down the nail before building it back up into something, well, a wee bit better than the natural look. - Nathan VanderKlippe/NNSL photo

This, in case you didn't quite catch the connections, is sculpture. Fingernail sculpture, to be exact.

And Raine Eskelson is good at it. So good, in fact, that this Yellowknifer recently grabbed top spot in a national artificial-nail competition held in Edmonton.

Eskelson is an esthetician by trade, by training and by upbringing. Her mother was a hairdresser, and Raine says she fell into aesthetics pretty naturally.

In 1994, she went to the International Academy in Sherwood Park, Alta., and graduated a licensed esthetician.

Now she owns her own beauty parlour -- Studio 62 -- and finesses the nails of about 40 people in town.

Artificial nail-building, she says, is all about making the end product look as natural as possible.

"A lot of people ask my clients if they have artificial nails. If they have to ask, that's a compliment," she says.

Natural isn't the only goal. This is improving on reality: artificial nails "look nicer than natural nails."

Making the nail natural means following a number of nail rules. First, the nail tip should not extend farther than one-third of the natural nail-bed. Doing so would weaken the nail and make it look unnatural. The tip can't be too thin, the sides can't flare out, and the nail's form has to follow a gentle arc from cuticle to tip.

Using a file, she roughs up the surface of the natural nail to make it a more adhesive-receptive area. Then she covers it in "snow" -- a gel that she sculpts into the shape of the nail. When the form is complete, she cures the new nail under a UV light.

Earlier this month in Edmonton, she was up against 22 other contestants working under the glare of notebook-toting judges and TV cameras which broadcast her work onto a big screens.

"It was crazy," she said.

Her first-place finish landed her $1,000 and a trophy, now on display above the counter at her business.

So is it surprising that the nation's best nail-builder lives North of 60?

Not really, considering the climate here provides the perfect environment for someone like Eskelson to ply her trade, she says.

"With the climate so dry, a lot of people can't grow their nails. They get too brittle."

It wasn't climate that gave her first place, she added. "Mine looked the best," she said.